A recent post on the WOT forum by a WOT community member details how this person received a PM from a ParetoLogic person questioning why a comment was made that ParetoLogic produces rogues:
The flavor of the PM from the ParetoLogic person was innocence. Additionally, the ParetoLogic person posted this:
“I found it difficult to find specific complaints or reasons for finding ParetoLogic software to be ‘rogue’ or otherwise unworthy.”
That prompted me to do some investigation. Here are the specifics about ParetoLogic rogues . . . and for my example; I have chosen ParetoLogic’s RegCure.
I ran two highly regarded registry cleaners: Auslogics and CCleaner. After they made their scans and I “fixed” the detections so that there were no longer any detections, I ran RegCure and compared the results. As you will see, those results are revealing and it’s why so many people have called ParetoLogic products “rogue“.
The Auslogics scan results:
146 errors.
The Auslogics scan results AFTER fixing those errors:
ZERO errors.
The CCleaner scan results:
78 errors.
The CCleaner scan results AFTER fixing those errors:
ZERO errors.
So now I’ve cleaned my registry with not one, but TWO cleaners, and BOTH have told me that my registry has NO errors.
So now let’s take a look at RegCure, which I ran AFTER Auslogics and CCleaner indicated I had NO errors in my registry.
The Regcure scan results:
A whopping 364 errors, AFTER Auslogics and CCleaner indicated ZERO.
At this point it would be enough even for a beginner to deduce that RegCure is a rogue. But wait, there’s more.
When you click on the button for RegCure to fix those errors, this is what you get:
To fix those 364 dubious errors (and coincidentally, you can see that there were ZERO detections on errors that RegCure would fix for free “Font Entries” and “File Associations”…convenient, huh?), you need to PURCHASE the “registered” version. Now if that doesn’t fit the definition of “Scareware/Rogue“, I don’t know what would.
When a less than tech savvy user sees that 364 errors were detected in their registry, they would likely be duped into paying to remove those “errors”.
And I’ve said this many times before when it comes to hundreds of detections. Unless these are trivial, and consequently don’t need to be removed anyway (for a discussion of why, just look at this thread on the AumHa site here.
Scroll about 1/3 the way down to see the exchange between Bill Castner and Mark Russinovich), if you had 364 “serious” errors in your registry, you likely wouldn’t even be able to boot.
Now I can envision a response ParetoLogic might make. ParetoLogic would say something like “RegCure is more thorough”. I might be inclined to buy that, or at least consider it, if the RegCure results were at wide variance with just ONE other cleaner. But two, and good ones at that? C’mon!
So add ParetoLogic to the “Rogue Hall of Shame“.
It is really bad when all the sellers thinking about is to make sales or profit. Why don’t sellers just think about making a product that really satisfies the needs of consumers. Once this is done, then surely sales would definitely pour in. They don’t need to make desperate moves such as this one discussed in your article.
Andrew,
It’s a quick in and out scam to make a fast dollar. It stinks, but this is the reality.
Interesting results and findings of this software. It would be even more interesting to see the results, seeing if you get the same 364 errors, testing this software on another computer using the same software as above.
Makes you wonder when the FTC or the FCC for that matter will jump in and put a stop to this phishing software programs. They are flat out deceiving the average computer user. I guess there’s only 3 reasons the Federal Government is not jumping in to stop this…1) there’s no money in it, 2) they don’t know how to stop it or 3) all the above.
Rob,
Thanks for the comment. I think it’s time for not only the FCC to get involved, but also Google and Yahoo. There are many ads being served that are rogue software.
@Rob
Your comment about testing on another computer brings up this point.
Not to dilute my findings, but to get a precise picture, we would have to have an unaffiliated third party do the tests. That’s because a true test machine would only have Auslogics, CCleaner, and RegCure software on it, AND NOTHING ELSE, plus we would want to remove all suspicion of bias (“Fox guarding the Chickens”).
Nevertheless, these crude tests that I’ve performed DO show a wide disparity between detections and that is accurate within “give or take”.
I thought I’d better point this out before Paretologic attacked my findings as inaccurate. They are crude, but still accurate, especially considering the substantial difference between the RegCure detections (364) and ZERO.